Ross Douthat has read (sort of) a survey from the Pew Research Center, “Millennials in Adulthood,” and he has used his bully pulpit at the New York Times to sound the alarm about the findings:
“IN the future, it seems, there will be only one “ism” — Individualism — and its rule will never end. As for religion, it shall decline; as for marriage, it shall be postponed; as for ideologies, they shall be rejected; as for patriotism, it shall be abandoned; as for strangers, they shall be distrusted. Only pot, selfies and Facebook will abide — and the greatest of these will probably be Facebook.” 1
That this is a tendentious caricature (at best) of the survey can be determined just from that last sentence—even Ross Douthat isn’t silly enough to belief that Millennials will spend their lives devoted to “pot, selfies, and Facebook”. Regardless, Ross is serious about the survey’s dire implications for our social and political life:
“That’s the implication, at least, of what the polling industry keeps telling us about the rising American generation, the so-called millennials. A new Pew survey, the latest dispatch from the land of young adulthood, describes a generation that’s socially liberal on issues like immigration and marijuana and same-sex marriage, proudly independent of either political party, less likely to be married and religious than earlier generations, less likely to identify as patriotic and less likely — by a striking margin — to say that one’s fellow human beings can be trusted.
“The common denominator is individualism, not left-wing politics: it explains both the personal optimism and the social mistrust, the passion about causes like gay marriage and the declining interest in collective-action crusades like environmentalism, even the fact that religious affiliation has declined but personal belief is still widespread.”
Douthat goes on to invoke Robert Nisbet’s 1953 classic QUEST FOR COMMUNITY; he does so apparently without realizing that his worries about “individualism” are thus revealed to be absolutely nothing new.2 In fact, they’re something of a chestnut; American conservatives (and some on the Left) have been lamenting the loss of community and of “mediating institutions” for decades now. Conservatives, however, have also simultaneously been cheerleaders both for capitalism (the very system that has tended to undermine community in the first place3) and for Randian individualism (in fairness to Douthat, he has not been guilty of that, at least).
More importantly, Mr. Douthat has both cherry-picked the Pew survey (it’s available online4, should you care to cherry-pick it for yourself) and completely ignored at least one important factor in the results—economic uncertainty/insecurity. Nowhere does Douthat suggest that social views might be influenced by economic realities; he’s too busy going on about Big Ideas to bother looking at silly things like stagnant wages, outsourced jobs, a near-collapse of the financial system, burdensome personal debt, and lingering levels of high unemployment (and underemployment).
The folks at Pew know better, fortunately. Read through their report and you’ll see they point out (for example) that, although Millennials have been putting off marriage, “Most unmarried Millennials (69%) say they would like to marry, but many, especially those with lower levels of income and education, lack what they deem to be a necessary prerequisite—a solid economic foundation.” Given that “Millennials are also the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations (Gen Xers and Boomers) had at the same stage of their life cycles,” one can understand a certain hesitation on their part to start up families.
Similarly, when it comes to “social distrust,” the Pew authors point out that “sociologists have theorized that people who feel vulnerable or disadvantaged for whatever reason find it riskier to trust because they’re less well-fortified to deal with the consequences of misplaced trust”; in other words, the level of social trust drops in hard times, as other citizens become competitors for scarce resources (jobs) rather than sharers in prosperity.5
Economics are only one factor, of course; technology is another. Millennials might seem to be indifferent individualists to Douthat, but in reality “They have also taken the lead in seizing on the new platforms of the digital era—the internet, mobile technology, social media—to construct personalized networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups.” It’s reasonable to speculate as to whether these networks and affinity groups will prove as sturdy and as socially useful as more old-fashioned institutions (the Elks Lodge, the Knights of Columbus, the Ku Klux Klan Chamber of Commerce, etc.), but it’s also reasonable to point out that previous generations didn’t have the option of personalized digital networks, and to suggest that they probably would have seized it if it had been available. It’s less ideology than it is opportunity that prompts Millennials to go online.6
As for patriotism, the Pew survey doesn’t say it’s being abandoned; in fact, it says that 49% of Millennials agree that the phrase “a patriotic person” describes them well (35% say the phrase is a “perfect” description). True, that’s a lower percentage than registered by previous generations; on the other hand, Millennials “are also somewhat more upbeat than older adults about America’s future, with 49% of [them] saying the country’s best years are ahead…” I’ll take upbeat optimism over self-ascribed “patriotism” any time.
Religion? Douthat is correct that both religious belief and religious affiliation are on the decline: “[Millennials are] less likely to say they believe in God. A solid majority still do—86%—but only 58% say they are “absolutely certain” that God exists, a lower share than among older adults, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project.” Perhaps these numbers reflect the fact “that fully a third of older Millennials (ages 26 to 33) have a four-year college degree or more—making them the best-educated cohort of young adults in American history.” Still, 86% believing in God doesn’t sound like a major decline in belief to me—maybe Douthat, good Catholic that he is, is disturbed by the lack of “absolute certainty”? Even so, he ought not ignore what the report’s authors mention: “But if past is prologue, these young adults may develop a stronger belief in God over the course of their lives, just as previous generations have.”
That last observation can be extended beyond religion: “The attitudes formed in early adulthood don’t always stay fixed. In the latest Pew Research survey, about half of all Boomers (53%) say their political views have grown more conservative as they have aged, while just 35% say they have grown more liberal.” Ross Douthat ignores that, since it’s inconvenient for his thesis; he’d rather just extrapolate from current attitudes, assuming them to be etched in stone and assuming that Millennialls will still be all about pot, selfies, and Facebook even when they enter the retirement home (set up for Wi-Fi, no doubt).
If Mr. Douthat is worried about increased individualism and the loss of community, he should by all means write about it; but he ought not to distort the findings of one particular survey, nor offer that survey as normative, to make his case. His central concern is that human beings deprived of true community may be duped into joining ersatz substitutes (cults, sects, the Republican Party, etc.) and can be easy prey for charismatic figures (Ayn Rand, Jim Jones, Glenn Beck, etc.). That’s always a possibility and always a danger, but there’s nothing in the Millennial mindset, at least so far as this Pew survey indicates, to suggest that Millennials—well-educated, wary, and skeptical as they are—can get played for suckers any more easily than their parents or grandparents (some of whom probably voted for Huey Long, George Wallace, and/or Pat Buchanan).
To quote the noted sociologist Mr. Pete Townshend: I’m pretty sure the kids—the young adults, really, in this case— are alright.
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1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-age-of-individualism.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0
2 A new edition of Nisbet’s “magnum opus” was released in 2010 by SI Books; quite by coincidence, it featured “a brilliant introduction by NewYork Times columnist Ross Douthat”.
3 Along with the automobile, which undermined communities both by providing individuals with greater geographical mobility and by changing the landscape and design of the communities themselves: see any number of books on the subject, but particularly THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE (James Howard Kunstler) and ASPHALT NATION (Jane Holtz Kay). While Douthat sees the internet and Facebook as threats to community (and he’s not alone in that), some see them as much needed alternatives to what we had already lost.
4 http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2014/03/2014-03-07_generations-report-version-for-web.pdf
5 People who lived through the Great Depression will tell you otherwise; they’ll insist that everyone came together back then in neighborly fashion and shared what they had. Don’t believe those people; they’re old and cranky and their memories are unreliable.
6 Bill O’Reilly, of course, insists that Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have used Facebook; but what did I just tell you about cranky old people?
ADDENDUM: It’s bad enough that Rod Dreher (The American Conservative) thinks that Ross Douthat nailed it perfectly with his Millenials column (did Rod bother to read the Pew survey on which it was based?); worse, he drags T.S.Eliot into the conversation. Here is Dreher's quote (citation unspecified) from the late Mr. Eliot:
“So long…as we consider finance, industry, trade, agriculture merely as competing interests to be reconciled from time to time as best they may, so long as we consider “education” as a good in itself of which everyone has a right to the utmost, without any ideal of the good life for society or for the individual, we shall move from one uneasy compromise to another. To the quick and simple organization of society for ends which, being only material and worldly, must be as ephemeral as worldly success, there is only one alternative. As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term “democracy,” as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike––it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/gotta-serve-somebody-millennials-douthat-nisbet-eliot/
Give me, as they say, a freaking break. Numerous commenters on Mr. Dreher's blog have properly labeled this nonsense for what it is, so I won’t bother. I’ll just say this: Eliot wrote those words seventy or so years ago; has his dictum come true—has the increasingly secular West turned totalitarian? Which advanced democracy has instituted concentration camps or established a gulag? Theists do themselves and their cause no favor by telling the rest of us that unless we serve their God we’re doomed to serve tyrants and monsters instead.
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